This invention relates to identification and verification systems in general, and more particularly card verification systems for credit cards, automatic teller machine cards, entry control for premises, identification cards for institutions and employers, and the like.
Commercial transactions have evolved from rudimentary forms involving exchange of objects, such as barter and monetary systems using valuable metals to intermediate monetary systems employing tokens such as paper money, to complex forms in which tokens are eliminated and payment is transferred electronically and instantly. As commercial systems have become more sophisticated, greater financial power has been concentrated in increasingly smaller objects, such as credit card and bank cards. This concentration of wealth in singular objects has created great opportunities for fraud and deceit, and these opportunities have been exploited by unscrupulous criminals. Thus there has developed a growing need for verification and identification of the parties involved in commercial and monetary transactions.
Credit card systems have adopted measures that improve security by making counterfeiting difficult or inconvenient, but not impossible. For example, raised or embossed indicia incorporated in the cards make casual copying difficult, but counterfeiters have acquired devices for re-embossing existing cards as well as embossing bogus cards, and this measure is now generally considered ineffective. Likewise, the ubiquitous magnetic stripe bearing encoded verification data has been compromised by simple counterfeiting schemes that re-write false data in the stripe. Even the personal identification number (PIN), known only to the legitimate card holder, can be acquired by thieves by nefarious means to use a credit card or bank card fraudulently.
In general, it appears that all techniques for verifying the validity of a credit card or bank card (or any generalized document) relies on some form of embedded device in the document. There has been proposed that such sophisticated devices as holographic images, diffraction gratings, phosphorescent substances, optical fibers, and the like be incorporated in the document. These devices are generally fixed and invariable when incorporated in the document, and as such are available for a counterfeiter to examine, analyze, and duplicate. Eventually, the devices will become quantified, the standardized techniques that are adopted for machine reading the devices will become known, and counterfeiters will again be able to ply their illegal trade.
Thus as new security measures are created and adopted, it seems that new techniques are developed quickly to overcome these measures. There exists a need for a new card verification technique that cannot be counterfeited.